Re: Stupid Question maybe?

[Brian Kantor <Brian () ampr org>]

/24 is certainly cleaner than 255.255.255.0.

I seem to remember it was Phil Karn who in the early 80's suggested
that expressing subnet masks as the number of bits from the top end
of the address word was efficient, since subnet masks were always
a series of ones followd by zeros with no interspersing, which
was incorporated (or independently invented) about a decade later
as CIDR a.b.c.d/n notation in RFC1519.
        - Brian